The poor and unemployed, the Swill, are packed into giant high-rise tower blocks in the Western suburbs.
Writing for his sf magazine Dreams and False Alarms critic Bruce Gillespie stated: " The Sea and Summer is not a tract.
Every element in Turner's future can be seen coming into existence: the Greenhouse Effect, unexplained droughts, enormous currency problems.
Even the tower blocks can be seen as symbols of the present-day ghettoization of the western suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney.
"[2] On its publication as part of the Gollancz SF Masterworks series, Graham Storrs, for the New York Journal of Books noted: "It is written in a 'literary' style—the kind that attracts awards—but it is nevertheless an intelligent and nuanced look at a possible future, where climate change has happened, where the predictions of the collapse of capitalism in 'The Limits to Growth' have come to pass, and where our hapless grandchildren struggle vainly to keep what is left of our society from degenerating into chaos.